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Optimize your site for local search engine traffic

Getting local search engine traffic is one of the things that small businesses aspire to. Some even don't know they can increase the amount of local visitors by improving their website. So what can a local small business do to get the long-wanted local traffic?

What is local search?

Before we list things to do on your site to improve your local search engine traffic, we need to define what we want. This will help us to actually get what we want.

Local traffic denotes visitors, who searched not only for a general keyphrase, but also used a geographical term (a country, state, a town or any other geographical location). From this, it can be easily assumed that to get local search traffic, you need to have both the general keywords and geographical locations on your site. At best, you'll want the search engines associate your site with the industry you are in and with the specific location your shop is situated at.

Local search ranking factors

Once we know that we need to identify our business site with a specific geographical location, let's see what factors play a role in helping the search engines associate you with your local area.

(though I have not studied the patent (I confess, I do not read well highly-complex word ramifications), I'd suspect that your linking to local businesses with a geographical location in the link text might help as well)

Here are types of pages that can help the search engines understand your business location:

Directions pages,

"Our business and the local community" type pages,

"Places to stay when visiting us" pages,

"Places to dine when visiting us" pages,

"Places to see when visiting us" pages,

"Parks and Museums and schools in the area for the kids of potential homebuyers" pages,

"Places to stay when students attend our school" type pages, etc.

Others appropriate to the organization and its objectives, offerings, and approach to its customers

Generally, try to find out how the local people call your product, the area, the shop and what all words they use. Use the words on your site and in your advertising. This is the laser-targeting approach to local product promotion, promising great reach and conversions for anyone mastering it completely.

Also, it is important to cover a wider range of keywords by which your customers may call your product or service (it works world-wide, too, of course):

product names

brand names

Stock Keeping Units (SKUs)

slang/industry terms

government terms

In another post about Google local search ranking patent from Bill Slawski tells us what exactly Google estimates to be the location of a business. In a nutshell, the score is based on the amount of times a business is mentioned along with the location. While it doesn't mention links, it doesn't mean that they'll hurt here.

A recommendation, based on the above information, would be to get your business listed and mentioned on as many places as possible, hopefully, not only with an identifiable business name, but also with properly formatted (phone: 124 456 7) addresses.

Optimizing your local site

Quite a number of local search ranking factors means that you need not only to have address on all of your pages, but also the most specific address information you can provide.

Apart from simply mentioning the address on your site, you may as well use your location-specific landmarks on your site. Though the description of visual driving directions patent doesn't relate to local search, I don't see why it can't be used for it either.

Providing your location identifiers both to your site visitors and the search engines is vitally important, if you have a shop or provide services in your local area. However, specifying your location is also important even if your customers are not restricted to a geographical location. This will allow you interest those people that prefer to have business with people from your location.

Though there may be a temptation to include your physical address for the search engines, you'd rather focus on providing it for your visitors. It increases your credibility greatly, especially if you have a specific physical address and a phone number.

As a side note, you can add your site to Google Local Business Center (discussed at Cre8asiteforums), but don't expect throngs of visitors from this.

You can also use local marketing companies, such as Quigo for paid search distribution in the local media.

While marketing yourself to the local community, pay attention to using local names for products and areas. Make your promotion connect with the local people. (It is also important to tie your offline and online promotion to your website - or have corresponding information on it - but it is another story.)

Who will benefit most from local search?

Of course, only those who have local physical presence from associating their site with a location, such as:

physical shops with products one wants to touch/see before buying, such as furniture, musical instruments, kitchen utensils, cars

This list is by no means full and can be filled in by anyone, wanting to get local customers. Even nationwide companies can benefit from a more noticeable presence in the area around their shops or offices, such as charity organizations, for example.

That being said, from the recent analysis of keyword data by Mike Blumenthal, it is clear that real estate agents, car dealers and lawyers can benefit most from local search. Not only they will be getting more customers, which is natural, they'll highly profit from being able to sell more of their high cost products and services.

Such results don't mean that other industries won't profit from broadening their reach, it is just that they will probably need to be more proactive about it to be successful.

Is it worth it?

While there is an opinion that the majority of the site's traffic can come from the general queries, it has also been reported that on a properly optimized website 33% traffic can come from both general and geo-targeted search queries (the last 34% being from direct referrals). Thus, it is highly beneficial for a local business to adjust their website to their location.

As much as location-targeted traffic is an important part of overall search engine traffic, so is the traffic, coming from Google Local, Google Maps (including traffic from the spot above organic results on the SERPs) and other local search oriented online services. So it is also important to cover these resources in your local site marketing strategy.

In the semi-recent post by Bill Slawski, Local search at Rest, and Local in Motion, there are sixteen reasons why it is unlikely that Google Local will be able to replace other local-oriented resources. The most common being unawareness of local businesses of the opportunity to reach a new market of highly targeted customers from their own location. However, those sixteen points can be taken advantage of by applying them to your local website and business.

That being said, once a local business can get into Google Maps (and it doesn't have to own a website), it has a chance of appearing on the #1 spot above the organic results for a general phrase with a geographical location. While it is certain that Google Maps and Local are not used as much, it is yet another way to get more visibility among the potential customers. It has been reported that a business, listed on the #1 Google Maps position got a lot of contacts.

While it is obvious that site promotion for general phrases will help your geographical site promotion, your local site marketing will also help general site promotion as well, so it is a win-win-win situation, for your overall results, local traffic and your local customers.

Conclusion

Whether Google Local and other local search initiatives will be popular and bring customers to local businesses depends not only on Google et al, but also on the businesses, who use local search to their advantage, and also savvy Internet marketers, who promote local search by explaining the benefits of local search and providing local (SEO) services to their customers.

Thus, it is a matter of being early to adopt very efficient techniques to get more local customers - thus, possibly, gaining a fatal advantage over your rivals - and capturing your local market.

One more thing about local customers is that you not only get more customers, even from a single area, it is that, while providing value to them, you'll inspire them to talk about you and recommend you to their family, friends and such, thus building a strong community of customers and a strong business brand.

Learn more on other resources, covering local site optimization and promotion:

Comments

Great, comprehensive post. My landscaping company has been listed on google local for about a year and it always cracks me up when I get visitors from halfway across the country looking for landscaping services. Blogging has worked well in getting local terms to rank high. I started a blog last fall to test out local terms and within a month I was ranking in the top 10 for my county + landscaping or gardening. The domain I chose matched perfectly and I only had to write a couple of posts.

Yes, currently, attracting local customers is way, way easier, than it will be in a couple of years. You basically need to create a couple of geo-targeted pages and write under 50 articles to get that. Especially, if you social network among local businesses (and websites).

Awesome article Yuri, great resourse! If I can share one overlooked: Marketers are increasingly taking advantage of the local search engine we've developed at Zvents because it allows businesses to truly promote themselves. Those physical activity hubs and shops you mention advertise not just their business but the in-store sales, events, and attractions that appeal to customers and give them a reason to come in.

Zvents is reinventing local search recognizing that people are much more engaged with the engine when they can discover things to do in addition to the information they need to visit local businesses. With free business listings, web links, promotion of associated events, and syndication of our index to most of the major newspapers, the future of local search is in the reason to patron a business and Zvents' search engine is the easiest (cheapest) way for local businesses to do that.

Paul, I am sure if you explained what you have to offer in simple language, your advertisement would be much more effective. Also may be in the form of what people can do on your site and why they should choose yours instead of others.

So far, judging from your description, it doesn't seem different from other local search engines.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. How do you make your blog or website popular and generate a lot of traffic if you have great, quality content but are competing in a very established niche where most of the niche’s websmasters have already clued in on the techniques that work? In my recent attempt at promotin an internet business blog called hochstadt.com, I found some really tough competition. There are just too many websites out there selling themselves (convincingly) as gurus. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Cheers, Lilly

A great way if you don’t have the know how, nor the time to do it yourself is to pay a firm to have it done. I used Listed1st.com and I’m on top on Google! Search Google for “maid services in salt lake city” Molly Maids to the rescue!

About a year ago we re-vamped our website so that our online flyers would be optimized for local and more targeted searches. Example: city, state property type or auto make, model, city. The traffic to our member’s online flyer pages has increased 500% in 1 year. That is enough proof for me that local SEO works.